Trials of Twins
by WalkingInTalaria
Summary: A short series of three stories about the consequences of confusing your children. In which Elrond, Maglor, and Fëanor try (and fail) to tell the difference between their respective sets of twins.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

 **Disclaimer: All of the following characters are Tolkien's, and I can legally lay claim to none of them. Varda knows I wish I could.**

The summer breeze was refreshingly cool as Lord Elrond of Imladris abandoned all lordly dignity whatsoever and ran about the vast grounds of his realm with the same reckless abandon that his young twin sons, Elladan and Elrohir, displayed, dancing about only a few paces out of his reach. In a few long strides, though, he had swept them up and spun them around in a manner that made their mother, passing through the garden on her way to the weavers' shops, call out anxiously, "Do be careful with the children, Elrond, or I swear to Elbereth you will be the one tending their broken bones and cracked heads tonight!"

Paying no attention to his wife, Elrond pulled Elladan up by his arms and began to spin, laughing along with his son's enthusiastic screams and giggles. Sitting low on the ground, Elrohir waited with visible glee for his turn to come as his brother flew about in a circle several feet above the ground. However, as Elrond slowed and lowered a still-shrieking Elladan to the ground, a young Noldorin soldier, newly back from patrol with one of the rare scouting parties that went on expeditions in the wilderness surrounding Imladris, hurried up to them. "Lord Glorfindel has returned and wishes to deliver his report," he reported with a clipped bow.

Elrohir seemed about to protest, but his father was ahead of him. "I will be sure to spin you tonight, Elrohir, just as soon as Glorfindel and I have finished with the report," he promised his young son as he followed the scout. Elrohir nodded, clearly disappointed, but soon forgot in his excitement to join his brother in a frenzied game of tag over the lawns of Imladris. Elrohir eventually managed to catch his brother, after Elladan stopped running to marvel at a strange new beetle crawling over a fallen tree branch. The twins were occupied with observing it for several minutes, and in the course of following its wanderings, Elrohir fell into a puddle, Elladan decided to join him for fun, Elrohir managed to lose the beetle in a thicket, Elladan got his hair caught in said thicket trying to find it, and both decided to give up the search after the thicket broke from both of them leaning on it and they fell into another mud puddle. Much more wet, dirty, and hungry than when they had begun, the sons of Elrond made their way back to their home in the fading light, barely in time to be washed and given a hurried supper.

Later that evening, Elrond was concluding the final paragraphs of a letter to Thranduil requesting, in the most polite language possible, that said Sindarin king stop chasing his spiders west to Imladris for the Noldor to handle, since spider bites were becoming an unfortunately common source of injury for the elves of that house. Suddenly he heard the sound of pattering feet along the hallway, and a small figure pushed its way into his room. Looking up through eyes exhausted from composing and destroying multiple drafts that, try as he might to remain civil, expressed his massive amount of frustration with his neighbor's extermination policies, he saw the dark head of one of his sons standing at his desk. "Ada, ada," Elrohir squealed up at him. At least Elrond was fairly sure it was Elrohir. When he was too tired, he sometimes had difficulties telling his twins apart. This time, though, he was sure it was Elrohir, since he had gotten into the habit of tying different colored strings around his sons' wrists after the unfortunate time he had given Elladan a bath twice and Elrohir not at all. Elrohir's blue string was tied neatly around his wrist, though.

"Yes, little one?" he asked, wondering what Elrohir could possibly need at this hour of the night. Usually he was engaging in his nightly pillow fight with his brother before being tucked in by one or more parents concerned for the seams of the pillows.

"Spin me?" the young elf asked pleadingly, and Elrond suddenly remembered his promise of the afternoon.

"Of course," he replied, scooping his son up with a wide smile. "Just as long as your naneth never hears of this, understand?" he whispered with a conspiratorial wink, and Elrohir nodded firmly. "Ready? One…two…three!" In no time at all, Elrohir was flying around in circles by his arms, his squeals valiantly suppressed "lest naneth hear." Soon, though, Elrond slowed his circles and let Elrohir float gently down to the ground, but the small elf reached up again.

"Carry me back to bed?" he begged, still swaying dizzily from his spin, and Elrond obligingly picked his small son up once again, letting Elrohir clasp his arms around his neck and hang on tightly from there as he walked the short distance between his room and the one that the twins shared.

However, as he tucked Elrohir into his bed, he noticed that his son was, for seemingly no reason, laughing. He was giggling as though he had just discovered the funniest joke in the history of Arda, although there seemed to be nothing to cause the onslaught of laughter. "Elrohir, penneth, what is so funny?" he asked.

"Because you spun me twice, and Elrohir not at all!" _Elladan_ squealed in his excitement. With a groan which only writing diplomatic letters and confusing your twin sons can produce, Elrond took another, more careful look at his bouncing progeny. Yes, this time he was sure it was Elladan, and, now that he noticed it, the intricately woven blue cord that was meant to tell the Elrohir apart from his red-stringed brother was in reality only a small bit of blue yarn stolen from some elleth's yarn basket. Elrohir, who had been dozing off, woke up suddenly.

"Spin me, Ada?" he asked, causing Elladan to burst into further giggles. Elrond looked pleadingly to the heavens for inspiration. Suddenly struck by an idea, he returned his gaze to his young sons.

"Instead of spinning you, would you like me to tell you a story?" he asked, and both twins nodded enthusiastically. Their father's stories were seldom delivered, but were always magnificent, better even than Glorfindel's tales of fierce fights in the Elder Days, when monsters roamed the lands freely and elves and men were stronger and hardier than they were in the present days. "I am about to tell you a story from when I was little, and I was growing up in the house of the Fëanorians," he told them with impressive gravity, causing his sons to settle quietly and give him their full attention. "By the way, Elrohir, you should probably know that Elladan stole your spin from me," he remarked, pausing in his introduction, and watched in satisfaction as Elrohir proceeded to tackle his twin brother and sit on his head briefly before letting him up and resuming his attentive air. "Once, long, long ago, your uncle and I went out for a walk with your Grandfather Maglor…" Elrond began, even losing himself in the memory of the time long ago when he and Elros were young, even the age of his own sons now.

 **A/N: My sincerest apologies to anyone who has been waiting for an update to Many Meetings, and is disappointed to get some wacky twin-fic instead. The only excuse that I can give is that I have completely and utterly run out of inspiration for Many Meetings. If I ever manage to think up something remotely amusing for it, I will certainly update, but until then I can only say that I'm sorry for making you wait.**

 **Note on the classification of this fic: Although this chapter is set in the Third Age, it's so far removed from the events of the Lord of the Rings that I feel justified in putting it in the Silmarillion archive. Also, the following two chapters will be set firmly in the timeline of the Silmarillion, so putting it in the LotR archive would make almost no logical sense.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

Ever-present snow piles scattered the courtyard on the fortress at the summit of Himring Ever-cold, but even the freezing temperatures hardly kept the dark-haired twins Elrond and Elros from leaping through the snow and pelting their harried caretakers and each other with small, icy snowballs. Maglor sighed as yet another snowball caught him in the crossfire between the brothers. Maedhros gave him a wintry smile, allowing himself some slight amusement at his brother's predicament, until he himself caught a snowball to the face. Spitting snow, he called to the offender, Elros, "The first thing we are doing when we get to the training court is teaching you to throw straight!"

A highly unrepentant "sorry!" came from Elros, his dark hair powdered white with Elrond's successful shots. "It's not my fault I can't throw straight," he added. "I'm throwing with my left hand."

Maglor covered his face with his hands, stopping on the icy path across the courtyard that led to the area set aside specifically for weapons training. "Elros, why are you trying to throw with your left hand when everyone from here to Tirion-upon-Túna knows that you are right-handed?" he asked in a weary tone that brought a dry chuckle from his brother.

"You sound exactly like Mother," he remarked quietly, and almost sadly, despite his laughter. Maglor flushed slightly, but showed no other signs of having heard his brother.

"Because Elrond wanted to be you, Ata Maglor, so he said I had to be Atatoron Maedhros!" Elros shouted back, dodging another throw from Elrond, who was taking a mean advantage of his brother's distraction.

If it was at all possible, Maglor's weary expression became even more exhausted. "I am not cut out for parenthood, unlike our father," he remarked to Maedhros, who merely smiled and shook his head. "But Elros, why are you and Elrond fighting with each other?" he called to the brothers who were occupied with their game.

"Because Naneth always said, when we were little and she thought we didn't know what she was talking about, that the sons of Fëanor were Kinslayers," Elros replied promptly.

Maglor looked horrified, but Maedhros was the one who called the twins over, keeling to their level, and, as gently as it was possible for him to do, explained that they had never slain one of their own family, and they were not about to start doing it either. Suitably chastised for the moment, the twins were silent before Elros asked, "Does that mean that it's all right if I pretend to be Daerada Dior?"

"Nelyo, what nonsense have you been filling their heads with?" Maglor asked with a jaundiced air.

"None!" Maedhros protested. "They're not infants, if they know why they haven't a grandfather is it any fault of mine?"

"Elrond! Elrond! Atatoron says we can be Atar Maglor and Daerada Dior! I get to be Ata this time!" Elros shouted, running away to rejoin battle with his brother, delighted at the free use of his right hand once more.

"Now, just a minute, I never said"- Maedhros protested quickly, cutting himself off when it became evident that Elrond and Elros were paying him no heed whatsoever. In, fact, the oldest son of Fëanor could hardly help cracking the occasional smile as some snatch of the twins' playacting came to his ears.

"We, the sons of Fëanor, do request that you return to us the jewel of our father and our house, the Silmaril of Fëanor, unfairly kept from us by one Dior Eluchil," Elros was saying in his most polite and pompous tones. Elrond, on the other hand, was insulting him using his small store of Sindarin and Quenya curses, all while refusing to give up the Silmaril in the rudest ways possible.

"Did we really ask that politely?" Maglor whispered in an undertone to his brother, who shook his head slowly.

"As I recall, we were almost as rude about demanding as Dior was about replying," he said thoughtfully. "It's rather amusing how those two take our side in the fight and turn their own grandfather into a villain," he added with the slightest of smiles.

Suddenly an argument not in the natural course of Dior and Maglor fighting over the Silmarils arose, and naturally the twins ran to their "Ata" for help deciding. "Elros killed me, so it's my turn to be you now, Ata, isn't it?" Elrond asked pleadingly.

"No, it isn't," Elros answered stubbornly. "You got to be Ata all while I had to be Atatoron, and that was longer than I got to be Ata! Not that I don't like being you, Atatoron Maedhros," he added hastily, "but I don't like using my left hand to throw. I always miss."

"Now, now," Maglor said peaceably. "What have I taught you about diplomacy? Ask yourself what you want, and then ask yourself how you plan to talk the other person into giving it to you while thinking it was their idea the entire time," he instructed. "If you can't come up with a solution on your own, I'll decide for you, but not until then."

"Káno, not everything has to be a lesson," Maedhros said with slight amusement, but he listened with approval as the twins began to debate their points hotly. Elrond insisted that it was his turn by right, since Elros had gone first, but Elros was certain that he had not gotten to impersonate their Ata Maglor long enough compared to his brother. By the time they had reached the training grounds, they had still not settled the debate, and turned expectantly to their foster father, who sighed and pointed. "Elros, you have the honor of impersonating me this time," he said. "But be sure to give your brother a turn in a few minutes, all right?" Elros, completely covered in snow at this point, nodded firmly. Elrond looked about to protest, but Elros silenced him with a swift snowball to the face, and he forgot about his argument in his eagerness to pummel his twin in return. They returned from their snowball-throwing practice looking like elven snowballs. Maedhros had insisted that tossing the small, icy lumps of snow at one another had improved their reflexes and aim, but Maglor could tell he was mostly thinking of another set of twins, their hair bright red as his own instead of dark, and taking joy in the memory of much older snowball fights on the outskirts of Formenos.

The last cold, thin rays of Arien were slipping away over the horizon as the four trooped back to the main fortress, freezing cold and laughing, while the twins were still exchanging a few final sallies along the way. Maglor hurried them upstairs for a warm bath before their supper, much to the discomfort of the twins, but Maglor insisted that they would freeze in the short time it took them to eat unless they were properly warmed first. As he was testing the water that was warming before a blazing fire, he could hear the twins arguing as they pulled off their gloves, hoods, and cloaks. "You cheated," one of them – he was fairly sure it was Elros – muttered.

"It's not my fault that Ata still can't tell which of us is which!" Elrond said defensively, causing Maglor to start and hurry into the room where the twins were pulling off their sodden garments.

"Elrond, Elros, what are you arguing about?" he asked a little worriedly.

"Ata, Elrond got to pretend to be you more often than I did because you mistook him for me," Elros said a little petulantly. "He cheated!"

"I didn't!" Elrond insisted. "How was I supposed to know that Ata would mistake me for you? I just didn't argue about it," he ended defensively.

"Did I really – I did, didn't I," Maglor said, feeling exhausted for possibly the thousandth time that day. "Six months, and I still can't tell the difference between them," he muttered to himself. "Honestly, which of you is which now?" he asked. Maedhros, who was passing by on his way to the kitchens, stuck his head inside the door and looked briefly at the twins.

"Left is Elrond, right is Elros," he said at once before disappearing again, ignoring Maglor's confused splutters of "how can you tell" and "that's not fair!" The twins, on the other hand, dissolved into spluttering giggles, their own quarrel forgotten. They were met with a mock glare from their adoptive father. "Enough of that, you two," he said with mock sternness. "Now, who wants to go beg some scraps from our good cook and force the secret out of Maedhros with me?" Accompanied by two enthusiastic peredhil, both quite thankful that their promised bath had been deferred, the Fëanorian disappeared out the door, Oath, Silmarils, and Kinslayings all forgotten for that brief moment.

 **A/N: Thanks so much to all my reviewers! You give me that extra kick to keep on writing, which in fact is why this next chapter is up so soon. Thanks again, and I hope you enjoy this! One more chapter coming soon (possibly even another one after that, depending on how long this runs).**


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

"So, we have the one time with the birds, and the other time in the lake, and the day we were learning our letters – that's a year's worth, isn't it?"

"You put down the day we were trying to cook, of course?"

"Naturally. Is that all?"

"All for now. Will you read over this page while I check yours?"

A shuffling of papers ensued, then the room became quieter as the twins began muttering under their breaths, reading through the lists they had written up.

A few minutes later – "Ambarussa, did you actually count these?" Telufinwë grinned and shook his head.

"I guessed. I know you like mathematics more than I do, so I thought I would give you the great pleasure of counting things." He sounded far more satisfied than anyone had any right to be, and Pityafinwë expressed a similar opinion, accompanied by a heartfelt sigh.

"Enjoyment of mathematics and enjoyment of counting things are very different, you know. As a matter of fact, your guess was off by at least two places. This puts an entirely new face on things."

"How so?" Telufinwë asked, leaning his chair back onto its back two legs and closing his eyes.

"Let me think…let me think a minute or two…" Pityafinwë stared at the numbers on the pages for a few seconds, frowning in concentration. "You see, this number is more or less three times that one, but I don't know how to explain that."

"Oh! I do!" Telufinwë shouted, snapping his chair upright in his chair, his eyes flying open. "See, what this means is that he's sure half the time, and the other half he guesses, so he gets half right and half wrong of the half that are guesses. That wrong quarter is this number." He pointed at one page. "And the other three-quarters he gets right are that number." He pointed at another page.

There was a long moment of silence.

"So, in other words, our father can only tell the difference between us half the time, and he bluffs the rest?"

"Indeed."

"Well."

There was another long pause as the twins considered this.

"But Mother and all our other brothers can tell us apart?"

"Wait, what? Oh! Yes, you're right. I never realized that before. That's interesting. And, have you noticed? Grandfather Finwë and our half-uncles can't say accurately which of us is which either. Our half-cousins, either, even though you would think they know us just as well as our brothers do."

"You know, I think it's just something in Mother's family."

The words tumbled out of Pityafinwë's mouth without his thinking of it, but the moment he spoke, the brothers realized it was probably true.

"Yes…Mother and Grandfather and Grandmother and all our brothers can do it. And father can get it right maybe half the time, because he's married to Mother. That makes a really weird sort of sense."

"This is very odd."

"Yes."

"Did we just come up with a hypothesis? I think we're pretty much obliged to test it at this point."

"Then I'm not going to ask the question I was almost about to because then we would have to test that too, and I don't want to bother."

"Oh, come on, what is it?"

"I was just about to ask if it were the same with other twins too, or just us."

"Yes! That's brilliant! We have to test that, of course!"

Telufinwë decided that his brother was far too scientific for his own good, and that it would probably get him killed someday.

"Right, where do we start? We should probably change our clothes to look the same, and then do we split up or should they compare us side by side, and what's the best way to ask so it's not suggestive or weighted, and of course we can't tell them our hypothesis or it's not a real experiment anymore, in fact we probably shouldn't have been the ones to come up with it and then be the ones to test it as well because that's not scientific at all –"

"Pityafinwë Ambarussa. Slow. Down. We can go through this to make sure we do it correctly if you like. Just slow down a little and let me catch up."

It took an hour to work through the details of the experiment – the twins were nothing if not thorough. It took another three days to finish collecting the results from their family, ten more to convince the five other pairs of identical twins who were their friends to participate, and eight hours to organize and copy out all of their data into a neat thirty-page report, which went through what felt like a century of revisions, edits, and additions. The twins were still going through their results a day later, and their parents were beginning to wonder what had happened to their normally active and outdoorsy offspring.

"So, going off our hypothesis, Nelyo is actually the one most like Mother?" Pityafinwë asked, moving a book to look for his quill.

"It would appear so. That's odd; a day ago I would have said Makalaurë. But he's almost as like Father as Atarinkë, if you go by the number of twins he gets right and guesses."

"That _is_ strange. But the evidence backs up the hypothesis fairly well, except we didn't think about what happened with other pairs of twins."

"I would never have thought identification accuracy would be proportional to similarity to Mother."

"Yes, that was rather odd. How many did Atarinkë get right, by the way?"

"Let me look…" Papers ruffled as Telufinwë dug through the chaos that had appeared all over the room for the duration of their experiment. "Oh, here, he got one right for sure and had to guess on all the others. For comparison, Carnistir got two and guessed three, but he got one of his guesses right, and Nelyo got four and guessed one, but he got his one guess right."

"Well, he is always the diplomat here. I'm not surprised he's the most like Mother."

"True."

There was a long silence, broken only by the shuffle of paper and the scratch of a quill as Pityafinwë started a new graph on the twelfth page of their report. Telufinwë, having nothing to do other than organize the dozens of parchment scraps they had used to record their results, grew bored quickly and broke the silence first.

"Should we show all of this to Father?"

Pityafinwë raised an eyebrow at his brother. "And let him know that we know he doesn't know us as well as he wants us to think? No, that would just be rude. Better to let him continue in blissful ignorance, don't you think?"

Telufinwë laughed a little, flopping back onto what little open space remained on his bed. "So, what you're advocating is that we keep him in the dark about us knowing he's been keeping us in the dark about knowing which of us is which? Do you have any idea how funny that sounds?"

Staring down his nose at his brother, Pityafinwë replied in his best imitation of their paternal grandfather, "It doesn't sound funny unless you decide to make it so, small one."

Telufinwë raised a finger from his relaxed position, refusing even to open his eyes. "One – your name literally means 'small Finwë,' so you have no right to call me small one. Two – I am the older one of us, so, again, you have no right to call me small. Three –"

Pityafinwë interrupted him. "Father told me last week that I was older than you by twelve minutes."

Telufinwë stared at his brother blankly. "Mother told me I was older."

The twins looked at each other for a minute. Then, in unison, they whispered, "We must never speak of this again."

Years later, when the histories of Arda were being written, conflicting evidence for the relative ages of the twins Amrod and Amras was found, and Noldorin historians argued the point for years before admitting defeat in the face of the tangled, twisted, obscure mess of anecdote and rumor and legend that was the lives of the Fëanorians.

But the gist of the story, as Maglor told it to Elrond and Elros, was good enough, and the two stories together were good enough for Elladan and Elrohir, and in time it became the great Tale of the Twins, passed down through the kings of Gondor as they told their children stories of their ancestors of long ago.

 **Author's Note:**

S. Sgriobhadaireachd deserves all the credit for this update. Her review made me feel so bad about not having written more for this that I holed myself up in my room all weekend and did nothing but scribble my brainchildren out onto a battered notebook until this appeared.

Amrod and Amras's confusion over the order of their birth is a nod to the actual canon debate over which one is older. The legendarium is conflicted on this point. Also, for those of you who have read _History of Middle-earth_ and are about to bring up the hair color difference,Amrod and Amras are still children; Amrod's hair has yet to darken noticeably. "But they already know how to conduct a scientifically correct experiment" of course they do. They're Fëanor's sons. The kids probably grew up learning the chemical makeup of every meal they ate.


End file.
